On The Road To Rick
by DAISHIGAJO
Summary: It's a long road to Rick. But we will get there.
1. Chapter 1

On The Road To Rick


	2. Chapter 2

**DAY ONE**

On The Road To Rick

It hurts, when I wake up.

The last thing I remember . . . God. Being in . . . Praying at church? Asking God to help me. I'd just been diagnosed with this cancer. This . . . this thing inside of me.

It was early. An early sign that more terrible things would come. That was enough though. I'd spent too much time doing nothing. On my ass, sitting around all day. Letting my own body creep up on me. If anyone ever asked for a disease like that, it was me. It's not as if a diet of beer, coke, and hamburger meat ever made someone healthy.

Not like I need anyone to tell me I need to survive. When I wake up, I'm in that organic center. That home for the dying. Maybe they used to call it a hospice. I just call it a long-term grave. Doesn't matter. Here's all that matters. Well, it matters to me. I remember the last time I got checked in here. Yeah, it hurts. It hurts waking up and stripping cables and wired from your body. There are needles I rip out of my veins when I'm trying to stand up.

Maybe you've never been in pain. Biological pain. I feel what it's like when those needles go scraping out of my veins. I pat down the blood and try to keep it from streaming out of my veins. Blotting blood isn't what I normally want out of my weekend. It's everything I didn't want when my old life was here. I never wanted to wake up and find . . . I never wanted to wake up and find streaks down my skin. From my elbows down to my wrist of brown streaks. Of dried blood.

Has there ever been a man who thought life was better when his blood was just dripping out of him? I don't. They see it, when I start slapping at my arms like a kid that's desperate to just slap the fire ants off his or her arms. The dried blood doesn't move. It fidgets a little when my fingers brush over it. Nobody cares though. The blood doesn't care. I just keep slapping at my arms like an idiot. I want to die. I just escaped death but I want to die. Then I have what feels like a hundred people trying to calm me down. It's more like half a dozen people, most of them nurses. They're all telling me it's going to be okay. For some reason, I believe them, at least for a second.

That's when life just stops.

Let me give you a piece of advice.

Don't? Don't wake up in a hospital. By yourself. With nobody else around you. And nobody to help you.

You hear these stories, right? About all these super hero type of guys who just push tanks over like the Incredible Hulk or wake up out of comas and just start mowing down Nazis.

Let me tell you something.

 _I am not that guy._

It hurts, man. It fucking hurts to just walk. How old are you. 15? 20? I'm 31. By my age, I'm already used to getting out of bed sometimes and feeling like my leg wants to cramp up and die on me. After being in a hospital bed for God knows how long? Fuck's sake, I want to die. I want to go back and lie down in that hospital bed and just die. Someone else take me, Lord Jesus. Please take me to the El Paradiso ice cream parlor of the afterlife because when my leg locks up, I almost crash into the ground. Everyone experiences life differently. When you're young, ice cream is amazing. Feel the rush. Cold shit everywhere through your body. Feel the ice as it goes through your veins.

Got damn. Sometimes, when I've been sitting for a few hours, the thought of something icy cold is the epitome of hell. Because my foot already feels like a block of ice.

So, yeah, fuck you, ice cream Except when it's nice and tasty and cold in the hottest part of summer. Otherwise? Get the hell out of the office building. I'm old.

Not really. Early 30s. Just . . . it's weird how much life can suck when you've spent the last ten years of your life sitting in a chair. It's not natural, you know? So yeah, early 30s middle aged guy who doesn't work out? That's me. That's me, living me who just woke up in this . . . whatever this is. The hospital's dead. I'm not stupid. I can see that life isn't great. The machines are off. Those beepers should be beeping. You know the beepers? The machines that keep beeping? They keep going beep. Beep. _Beep._ If they stop peeping, you should be dead. I'm not dead, but those machines aren't beeping. That makes me scared already. They're not even registering if _I'm alive_.

Maybe I shouldn't be. So I strip the wires out of my veins. I do it way too quick. It's so fast I can feel it, the weird pools of blood on my skin when the wires rip out of my veins. _GOT DANG_ it hurts. It FU-KIN-HURTZ.

Excuse me. It does. It feels like Satan dragged his posterior over my arm and specifically decided to grind it into the pit of my arm. Yeah. It sucks. It's like someone taking a jalapeno and pushing it into your skin and constantly asking, "DOES IT HURT? DOES IT HURT?"

Yeah, asshole. It hurts. Except, in my case, it's my own fault. I rip my arm away from the wire and look, like a horrified child, when liquid starts spurting all over the floor. I don't know what the hell I expected. It sucks. It sucks because my arm feels like a hedgehog stuck me through the skin. Is that what people are supposed to feel? That's what it feels like! Like my arm wants to die. My whole arm just goes limp for a second before my brain starts connecting with my arm again. When my fingers start moving, it's like I'm back in the days of Jesus. I don't care if you're religious or not, that Bible has all those stories about Christ doing weird ass miracles. Blind people seeing, like they smoked weed for their glaucoma. The deaf hearing. That didn't have anything to do with weed, but whatever. Maybe weed can make you start hearing out of nowhere. That's the miracle drug it could've been if that got dang FDA hadn't been on the payroll of the United States government.

Sorry. Sorry. I'm laughing. You should be, too! My friend Luis used to think the U.S. government was competent enough to keep all the best diseases out of the control out of the public. He said they were trying to keep the public out of the loop from the real cures.

Hey Luis. I'm awake in a hospital with no doctors or nurses and no signs that the power's on. I'm pretty sure this isn't what they were shooting for. Okay. Okay. I was ready to die. Really. I was ready to give up the ghost, but apparently, I wasn't supposed to. _Because I'm gorram curses to wake up in an effin power dead hospital by myself._ You tell your kids that magical fairy tale about waking up in a house for the dead with no power on.

The wires are the worst. Just puling them out's a chore. I almost feel like tilting over onto my face when I'm done yanking them out. You ever yanked a wire out of your arm? You might as well pretend like you're the Borg. Fuck. Nobody even knows who the Borg are anymore. I was already getting old by the time people stopped thinking about them. Okay, so, the Borg were these beings from science fiction who assimilated everything. I mean, _everything._ It was like watching ants overrun your home. Kind of like zombies. Except, I could believe in a reality where the Borg exist. That makes sense. You know, half alien, half human creatures that were made to be the perfect bond of the natural and technological. That shit is amazing to think about.

Got DAMN does that last wire hurt when I rip it out. Who cares. The minute it's out of my skin, I'm marching. Well, marching's too strong of a word. It's more of a haggard walk, like one leg can't feel where the other is. It's like trying to walk in two step with your younger brother's who's strapped to your ankle. Good luck with that shit. I actually want to die when I'm done being strapped to those machines, because my arms are on fire. It's not like they were working anyway. All I know, is, when I'm done stripping those wires out of my arm, I feel like hell. My legs want to just collapse underneath me, and my arms feel like the kind of spaghetti strings you'd dangle out of your teeth because you knew at any moment, you could chomp down and cut the strong in half. I'm not saying I could snap my arms in half. God, what are you thinking? That's, like, the most inhuman accusation you could ever make. Who the hell just bites their own _gorram_ arm in half?

I'd be the fucking worst if I did that. Holy shit, I might like a little bit of the green goddess now and then but that doesn't make me a tweeker. If that's what you were thinking, well, congratulations America. You really pushed that indoctrination onto the next generation. Weed is so much worse than meth, apparently.

Holy hell, why am I thinking about this.

I just snap to, like the whole world's suddenly rushing at me. It just clicks all at one that not only am I in a hospital, but it's a dead hospital with no power. Short of an atomic blast or some sort of futuristic ion bomb, the power's not just supposed to go out. I mean, we've all seen the movies. Let's not pretend like I'm the only one. _Hunger Games?_ Fuck, even that old tv show, _Dark Angel_? All this shit starts with some sort of weird futuristic A-Bomb or ion blast! I've played video games, I know how this shit works! Look, I'm not stupid either. I'm not Mad Dog Mathis or some fucking Donald Trump genius. I always preferred lounging around my apartment for about 12 hours while I let a good, thick cloud of the secondary inhalation settle into my room. But fuck you if you think I didn't do some reading now and then. Shit. Do you go to your apartment room saying "LULZ PLEB" and talking about what a cloud rider I am?

Whatever, that's your problem. My problem's looking at the door in front of me. When I get a little bit closer, it starts to click in my head that something might not be right in this building. By "not be right," I actually mean "totally fucked up." Who wants to wake up in a hospital with all the power out and nothing working? Because that's exactly what I wake up to. The only good thing that I notice is that there's a pair of clothes that I belong to me up on the closet. Now, I don't want to shortchange anyone. I'll be real clear about what I'm looking at. In front of my eyes, a pair of clothes on a hangar. That hangar, on a door handle. Above that door handle? A tv screen that's blurting static. Now, I've never been a man of many tastes. Give be a bottle of Bud, _and a handful of bud_ , and I'll pretty much be alright.

Don't you dare judge me.

Now let me tell you something else. I would never, ever tell my next of kin to leave me in a dead hospital room with the only power running to a staticy television. That's nightmare fuel, you know what I'm saying? Pure bullshit. I practically jump at the hospital door when I see all that happening.

Got DAMN am I an idiot.

Hot tip, ladies and gentleman. Do not, let me repeat, _DO NOT_ just wander out into your local hospital to which you have no knowledge of when all the power in your room is not functional. It's like waking up inside of an ant pile and saying, "You know what looks great? Jumping into that hornet's nest." Because I end up literally looking down a blackened hall with no windows and now lights. You might as well look down the devil's anus. That's what I am personally being forced to stare down when I look down that empty hall.

 ** _VERY IMPORTANT INTERLUDE_**

Look. God knows I'm not a good person. I've done more publicly embarrassing sexual things than any man in his late 20s should admit to. But this? Staring down the gullet of the devil's anus?

In a got dang hospital with no lights or power?

Oh, really? You're going to point out to me that I'm a sexual deviant with a pot addiction but I won't say the words _T?_ Hey, let me clue you in, fellas. I may not be the best person in New York but I'll be damned before I go around willingly taking the sacred name of the All Father in vain. Because if some shit is going down in this hospital, I'm not f-

Look. I'm a comedian type of guy. I smoke weed, I get drunk, I rip my shirt off. That's what I do!

Why the _fuck_ would you ask me to listen to the shrill _scream_ I hear when it pierces through the halls. I literally, _literally_ , want to drop a double in my pants when I hear it. It's the sound you hear in your nightmares. You know, when you're literal, and your mom tells you that one terrible story. No, screw you, not that baby shit she gave you when she wanted to be nice. Every mom keeps one story in their back pocket. You know the story, it's the one that literally makes you want to crap your pants because it's so scary.

Fine. You want to pretend? Let's go. In some parts of America, it's the story of the Boogey Man, and God help you if you watched the Real Ghost Busters version of that shit because that was the sort of thing you saw as a kid that made you lose your soul on the spot. No jokes, your soul just up and went adios. Okay, but in other cultures? You ever heard of the Donkey Lady? _LA MUJER DEL BURRO_? Got dangit. Got danigt, you should've checked this shit out for yourself before you decided to hassle me about all this bullshit. The Donkey Lady? Seriously? She actually goes out an takes little kids when they're alone an drowns them in rivers. Why wouldn't she do the same to a grown ass adult when he's all alone by his own damn self in the middle of abandoned hospital.

Oh. I'm being hyperbolic. You think I'm being hyperbolic.

Screw off. Because I am actually listening, _listening_ , as some old lady moans her way down the hallway. No, I can't see her. I don't need to see her. When was the last time in your life you needed someone to make it super obviously clear they were around. I never needed to hear my grandmother shout at me three times in a row whenever she stopped clutching her walker. Oh, don't you fucking dare look at me like I'm the devil. I made that woman food until the day she stopped breathing, o just because I acknowledge the fact that she was in a walker doesn't mean anything when it comes to how much I actually did for her.

Which, by the way, who the hell am I even defending myself to? I almost sprint down the hallway when I realize there might be some decrepit old person I need to help. I just follow the moaning, thinking that maybe, just _fucking_ maybe, I can save somebody's life. Like, that would make my mother so proud. Not as if she's around, but you get what I'm saying.

That's the thing, though. That's the thing. The further down the hall I go, and the louder the moaning gets, the more that I'm absolutely sure I've made a mistake. It's like stepping into the lion's den when you're a Hebrew. Just, in my head, I keep thinking I'm going to find one body after another, like I'm wandering into some sort of perverse torture chamber. I'll keep things short. When I'm walking, I see one body after another laid out on stretchers. It's pretty obvious, by the time that I'm walking up to the end of the hall, that something went royally wrong in here.

Honest Johnson? I don't even reach the end of the hall. Whatever moaning's going on? I duck out into a fire exit before I even get there. There's this fire escape stairwell that I find. The second, the _second_ I see it, I take a ducking dive into it. After that, it's one foot after another while I'm rushing down the steps. Don't me. Don't give me your 'gram shit. I was trying to survive, muthafucka. Sur. Vive. Because I had this feeling, this inkling, in the back of my head. Just this weird thought. This idea that something wasn't right.

Want to know why I thought that?

Alone. In a hospital. No power. No family. No support. Stuck in the middle of god-dang-Georgia.

Then think about me as a black toker in that same fucking situation. The police would probaly've shot me before they pointed their guns at the zombies because they felt 'threatened.' Fuck's sake. Who the hell cares, anyway. All that matters is that I get to the bottom of the stair well. Want to know what else happens when I get down there?

Hah. I feel a dooby creeping out of the corner of my jacket that was in my hospital room. Wherever the hell I was going, apparently I was ready to drop some serious compound to zone out during the proceedings. Not that anyone cares while I'm putting it to my lips and lighting the same lighter I found next to my joint.

Let me give you another tip.

Never. Don't you ever.

Think a pothead will get you out of the zombie apocalypse. Now let's smoke up.


End file.
